Lacking Mannequins, Hamas EMT Trainees To Shoot People, Treat Them

Gaza City, September 30 – The bevy of supply restrictions facing residents of this coastal territory has taken their toll on various civil services, including paramedics, who, in the absence of dummies, must now resort to injuring people in order to gain training for treating those injuries.

Egypt and Israel control the border crossings to and from the Gaza Strip, suspicious of Hamas, the terrorist organization that runs the territory. In practice, although Israel will allow into Gaza almost any civilian goods, Palestinian leaders blame the Jewish State for imposing a “siege” by land and sea, a move aimed at keeping out weapons that would be used against Israel. Hamas authorities have declined to import more training mannequins, citing the siege and budgetary constraints. The previous stock of mannequins was destroyed over the summer during the brief war with Israel, when the dummies were used as decoys to draw Israeli fire and lure IDF soldiers into booby-traps.

Previous attempts to replace the mannequins with cadavers proved only a mixed success, with the trainees unable to or unwilling to perform the required techniques on decomposing bodies. Faced with the need to maintain an effective corps of rescue workers, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health came to the realization that the Gaza Strip has a vast wealth of resources in its people, who could serve as stand-ins for the mannequins. Last week the newest version of the training program began, with rescue workers and trainees shooting, beating, stabbing, or driving cars into 25 people, mostly members of the rival Fatah movement, after which they practiced the treatment techniques they had been taught in the classroom.

Ministry officials deemed the initial effort a success despite the deaths of 20 of the 25 stand-ins, as the deaths of Fatah members are always viewed positively, though they concede the human specimens do not provide the same reusability that a plastic mannequin would. Nevertheless, says health official Afeel Stabbi, the abundance of disposable humans makes that an irrelevant concern in the short term.

“Whereas with a plastic mannequin the trainees can take turns with, for example, chest compressions or stitches, the use of a living – for the moment, anyway – human is limited to two, maybe three trainees before being rendered unusable. That’s not really a problem, since we can just go out and get another one as needed. There are literally millions of them walking around out there,” he explained.

Human rights organizations addressed the issue by condemning Israel for the blockade, and are counting the casualties of the training as civilians killed or wounded by the IDF. Public reaction in Gaza has been muted, primarily by force.